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Get away from me you dumb flipping dog.
You circle around with your stinky oozing paw, limping.
The floor recoils from your touch.
You are oil to my water.
Piggy the Wonder Dog. You used to jump through
hula hoops in a single bound, sporting that Mohawk
like nobody’s business. Looking so fine, like a circus dog.
What is he? people would ask. ‘e’s a Dingo! we’d say.
Jonesing to ride a monkey’s back into somebody’s notice me life,
insistent like rain that won’t let up.
You make me want to shoot you in the head.
Fireworks.
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
You are our escape from reality
and no one wants you to die.
I imagine playing with you when you were a puppy.
We could have gone camping to Yellowstone
or chased our dreams across Hill 57.

Brenda Warren 2016

Piggy the Wonder Dog 2015

If you want to see the prompt that brought me here visit Elizabeth’s 1sojournal. Piggy deserves a long story, and one of these days he will get one. He is still here, but age and infirmities complicate things for him.

Invisible in this heat,
our breath threads through the air
and we expect pillars of salt to rise,
casting shadows where our shoes
melt against gravity’s pavement
connecting us to history’s
sweaty landscape of fry bread and
Ferris wheels.

Fresh horseshit sends us
a breeze of sweet pungency, and
our eyes connect in smiles
as we sense our plan’s fruition,
then head to the barn to breed.

We take this last chance before war
fetches you again, like a dog
lays claim to its bone.

Brenda Warren 2013

Note: Every summer of my youth, I attended The Last Chance Stampede and Fair in my hometown. Other than the title, the piece is fiction. It started surreal, and worked its way into something else. As our poet friend Catherine McGregor says, sometimes poems have minds of their own. Indeed they do.

I saw a man swerve his car
into his life.
I saw a child kick a dog,
then I stopped to vomit
into a bag you pulled over my head
while some other part of me
watched from beneath
the gutter’s
utter
stench.

Brenda Warren 2013

Processing it: Wowza… that was weird. Quickly, click on the bee
before they vanish forever…that’s where you’ll find the prompt.

Luray Flying thinks that cumbersome stands out like that booger on Mrs. Challenger’s nose, dangling there, reluctant to join the murmuring mass of words posted on Challenger’s industrial strength file cabinet. Luray says, “Hey Mrs. Challenger? You print them words on magnetic paper so they won’t stray like Mr. Hurley’s dog?” She knows Mrs. Challenger will appreciate the simile.

Mrs. Challenger cups the backside of her palm around her mouth and sardonically says, “If he wouldn’t pelt it, it wouldn’t stray.” She points to the word pelt, and they know she’s looking for more similes.

Lester entrances the girls, and makes Mrs. Challenger smile.
“You have the heart of a poet, Lester. Similes rise like smoke through your words.”

“How about cumbersome?,” Luray asks, pointing to the word hanging on Challenger’s file cabinet like that booger on her nose, “Can you use that word, Lester?” Luray pauses, then swoons, “It’s like a cement block chained to my slender ankles,” she sways her foot in the aisle, then drops it hard, ” . . . cumbersome.”

Lester thinks through his senses, then answers, “The thought of a loser like Hurley pelting a creature like that sly brown dog, weighed cumbersome on the boy’s heart. So he took that dog home with him and fed it good, right after using three feet of chain to collar Hurley up to a tree, where he made him get on his hands and knees and kicked him three or four times in the belly and hindquarters till he yelped like the wretched cur that he is.” Lester holds up his hand, closes his eyes, and shakes his head. Deliberately.

Two weeks later

Lester Jones didn’t do it, he was on the class picnic when Hurley was nabbed, but Lester did give Ted Drummond a map for the deed.

The caption under Hurley’s picture in the News Argus read, “Richard Hurley was found chained to a tree north of town, where he was kicked like a dog and left for dead. Authorities found him after two days with no food or water, and are looking for a masked man with a rifle.”

Hurley’s dog disappeared, and few people know that it is forever eating Alpo on the Drummond family farm out by Utica. And our class? We never speak of it. Not one word. Not one.